


Pearlshell

by tiger9in1



Series: Bear Daughter [1]
Category: Bear Daughter - Judith Berman, Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Escape, F/M, Female Persona 5 Protagonist, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:09:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25156771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiger9in1/pseuds/tiger9in1
Summary: This is an imagining of the setting of "Bear Daughter" using Persona 5 characters in similar roles. Although the name isn't mentioned here, Aimi in the story is the name given to Ren, who's female in this version. She remembers it later, but it was forgotten with the rest of her memories.
Relationships: Maruki Takuto/Persona 5 Protagonist
Series: Bear Daughter [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824052
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an imagining of the setting of "Bear Daughter" using Persona 5 characters in similar roles. Although the name isn't mentioned here, Aimi in the story is the name given to Ren, who's female in this version. She remembers it later, but it was forgotten with the rest of her memories.

Aimi, Beautiful Love, was a most beloved princess. Her husband Maruki adored her, and his father, that magnificent king, indulged her like a favorite daughter. Her attendants were her husband’s younger sisters. They bathed her and dressed her and sang for her pleasure; they embroidered her clothing and tidied her bed. They combed her hair in the morning and brought her perfume in the evening, before she lay down with her husband. They would not let her do anything for herself.  
For Aimi, the king opened his treasure boxes. Her attendants dressed her in cloth dyed all the colors of sunshine, so soft it slipped over her skin like a lover’s kisses. They adorned her with pearls, with beads of red and yellow crystal, with the sunny yellow copper, heavy and incorruptible, that bedecked her husband’s house and everyone in it. They presented her with trinket boxes and embroidered pouches, mirrors, and painted hats. She had no robe, but days were so warm in her husband’s country that no one wore an outer garment, and at night—she never went out at night.  
The name of the king’s house was the Palace-of-Heaven. The house was large; a person had to shout to be heard on the opposite side of the hall. Not that Aimi ever shouted. If she needed anything, an attendant ran to get it for her.  
The wood the house was built of (Aimi never learned its name) was a wonderful thing; it never cracked or rotted, and when burnished it glowed with a sunny light even in the depths of night. Carvings adorned every post and beam of the house, and treasure boxes, stacked floor to ceiling, lined the walls.  
The food in the king’s house (she never learned its name either) was as delightful as everything else: sweet, fatty, smooth on her tongue. They always encouraged her to eat as much as she liked. Only the queen consumed more than she did.  
Palace-of-Heaven stood atop a white sand beach, overlooking a sea of transparent blue. Behind the house rose a forest of the yellow-copper trees from which, they told her, the house had been built. Its leaves chimed in the breeze that blew from the sea. Clad in bark, the trees did not shine as the house did, so the forest-unlike house or beach-was a place of shifting, light-spangled shadow.  
The house was beautiful; the people were beautiful; her food and clothes were beautiful. What gave Aimi true joy, however, was how much her husband’s family loved her. In the morning they greeted her as if she brought happiness the way the dawn brings light. In the evening they said goodnight as if parting from her grieved them. In between, they invited her into every pastime; they made her feel as if nothing could happen properly without her. Even the queen, whom Aimi suspected of disapproving of her son’s bride, never did worse than offer a greeting in place of a kiss, or a single word in contrast with her daughters’ affectionate chatter.  
And nights, when Aimi retired with her handsome, ardent, adoring husband—the nights, when she was the sole object of his attention—those were the most glorious of all. He would call himself a slave and Aimi his master; he would murmur the delights of each swell and hollow of her body. His caresses were like summer all over her skin. He would heat her up until he burned her blind and unknowing, and then he would hold her in his arms until they cooled enough to begin again.  
On the night they had married, after he kissed her the very first time, he had whispered promises in her ear. “I know what you want,” he told her. “I will give it all to you.”  
And he had.  
That was how she lived for a long time.

_______

Then the dreams began.  
Later she thought they must have lived inside her all along, drifting on currents that flowed far beneath thought and memory. Slowly the dreams swam upward.  
In one dream that returned over and over, she struggled through blue water, desperate for air. In another she pushed at the stars, trying to break through to the darkness beyond. She was searching in every dream, but she never knew in the dream or upon awaking what she searched for.  
After one of those dreams, she always woke to doubt. She was so different from these people. She did not know how to be merry and bright, how to laugh and chatter or joke, how to hug or kiss her sisters-in-law with half the warmth they spontaneously radiated upon her. Her husband whispered the most rapturous words in her ear, but she could not speak that way to him in return. She did not know why. They called her sweet-tempered and loving, but during those wakeful nights she could discover no love inside her, only a blank mist.  
At times, Aimi felt she resembled her mother-in-law. The queen, like her, had come from a different place. The queen, like her, lacked the luminous skin and blue eyes of her husband’s family. The queen, like her, was hungry and reticent.  
On the other hand, Takemi Death-Bringer was clearly not a person with doubts. The rare embrace or few quiet words she would give her children, the looks she cast in the king’s direction, made Aimi certain that wherever the unsmiling queen kept her emotions, they were neither insubstantial nor hidden from her.  
And the queen knew where she came from. The king hosted the queen’s relatives from time to time, and they looked like her: dark, sharp-nosed, with hooded eyes and enormous appetites. Even after feasting from sundown to sunup, they would eye Aimi in a predatory way she found unsettling.  
No one ever mentioned Aimi’s relatives and they never came to visit. At night she would wonder why she could not remember her life before her marriage, but it was not a thing she was able to ask about in daylight.  
Other dreams came to her as time went on, of running endlessly, of people lying broken and red-stained. She began to feel that her dreams were monsters lurking beneath the bright surface of her life, hungry to wrench her down into darkness. After such a dream she would cling to her husband until he awoke and chased away all glimpses of the monsters with his love.  
Once she tried to tell him about the dreams. “Don’t pay attention,” he said. “They can’t hurt you here.”  
She tried to follow his advice, but it worked less and less well. And slowly, doubt began to seep into the daytime.

______

A path led into the forest behind the house, under those yellow leaves so translucent they might have been made of the thinnest shell. One day Aimi thought: the path must lead to the creek that supplied the house with water.  
She could picture such a creek, rushing through shade and dappled sunlight. The noise of water over stone would be as lovely as a song, always changing, never ending.  
When she asked her husband’s oldest sister about it, Kasumi said, “You don’t want to walk in the forest.”  
“The trees are sharp,” said Sumire, the only child of the king whose eyes were black like the queen’s. “The leaves will rip your clothes and cut your feet.”  
Aimi was puzzled because they never denied her anything. “Couldn’t I go along the beach to the creek?”  
“There’s no creek,” said Sumire.  
“Oh, Aimi,” Kasumi said, “Weren’t we going to have a game of throwing sticks? Don’t disappoint us!”  
Her look of playful entreaty was irresistible, and Aimi dropped the subject. But she began to notice how freely they came and went from the house. The queen was away often, and the king left nearly every morning, returning only at night. When the king rested, her husband would go instead. Maruki would tie on a pair of odd, unadorned shoes and fetch something from his father’s apartment that he carried out of the house. Like the king, he returned after dark, weary as if from a day of labor. At the house, no one ever labored.  
They did take her when the entire household traveled to a feast. From the king’s great boat, Aimi would watch the passing forest, but she never spied the outlet of a creek.  
After one of these feasts, she would gaze into the abalone mirror her husband had given her. With her dark eyes, small nose, and pale skin, she did not look like anyone else she had seen. Wherever her people lived, it was so far away that she was the only one here.


	2. Chapter 2

One night, after waking from a dream, she rose on impulse and crept across the silent hall to the beach. Outside it was bitterly cold. The house shed yellow-copper radiance on the sand, in the sea swam a multitude of stars. Elsewhere profound darkness hid the world. The sand smelled of dew.

When she heard someone else coming through the door, she slipped behind the king’s boat, half-ashamed to be spying.

The king emerged wearing a pair of those plain shoes and, on his head, a headdress of the glowing abalone her mirror was carved from. He headed into the forest, crunching in the fallen leaves. After a moment’s hesitation Aimi followed him.

At first the light from the king’s headdress and his luminous person guided her. But the leaves were indeed knife-sharp as her attendants had warned, and the king walked so swiftly that he had soon shrunk to a distant speck of light. She stumbled on, shivering. The leaves under her feet gave way to sand, and she stood above starry ocean once more. She had crossed a point.

Then, as she stepped toward the sea, a hole gaped before her. Below it hung a bottomless void of gray mist.

Aimi stumbled back, dizziness sweeping over her. The hole wavered out of existence. Then the blinding disk of the sun swelled up into the world, and she stood above a blue sea like the one that lapped each day in front of the king’s house. Morning filled the air with warmth.

Shaken, she started back toward the house, mincing over the cruel leaves. Now the daylight showed her something else. Atop a little-used garbage heap, nearly concealed by fallen leaves, sat a pile of soiled, scuffed, reeking leather. Her nose wrinkled, but her curiosity was whetted by its very lack of resemblance to anything in her husband’s house.

She did not immediately have a chance to investigate. The air behind her rumbled and a blast of cold wind set the forest chiming. When she whirled to look, a terrifying form stood at the bottom of the beach where the hole had been.

An unfamiliar voice deep inside her said, A bird.

But she knew that this was not what a bird should be, this dark creature taller than the trees, with its beak and claws smeared with a sticky red-brown that smelled—  
\--that smelled of—

Again, the unfamiliar voice spoke: blood. Eagerness stirred in Aimi, shocking her.

When she blinked, only her dour mother-in-law stood there, pushing a feathered cloak from her shoulders. Aimi fled.

______

Relief and reproaches greeted her at the house. “Your poor feet!” Kasumi cried.

Only then did Aimi notice she had tracked blood across the spotless floor of the house. The cuts on her feet did hurt, but less than they seemed to think.

Her attendants told her never to go into the forest again, but she could not forget what she had seen: a hole in the world, a huge and bloody bird, a pile of something ugly and worn in a country where nothing else was. The reek of that pile stuck like a splinter in her thoughts. 

By nighttime her feet had nearly healed. After Maruki fell asleep, she took her abalone mirror and crept back to the garbage heap. Beyond the glow of her mirror, the forest was black and featureless. An icy wind made the leaves rattle like knives. She jumped when a shriek echoed over the forest. 

She squatted beside the pile of leather. The voice named the odors rising up from it: mold, earth, smoke, brine.

Another shriek cut through the night. Something is hunting, the voice inside told her.

Beneath a robe, a cloak, and other soiled clothing lay a large and heavy bag. As she lifted off the clothing, gingerly shaking away the leaves, two objects rolled loose. One was a little carving, the other a bulging pouch. Both had been strung on braided thongs.

The carving depicted a bird. Its beak was straight like the queen’s other shape, but its gaze was rakishly curious rather than ferocious. She sniffed at it. Whatever smell she expected was not there.

But then a rush of memory brought it back to her: coffee and curry. She smelled it on her mother’s neck, in her glossy blond hair. Ann held her, saying, “Oh, my baby, oh, my little girl.”

Sojiro had made the carving. He sat on the far side of a fire, whittling. Her father? She loved him.

How could she have forgotten them? Aimi began to cry, hollow with loss, hungry with longing.

Heavy footsteps crunched, close by—

Aimi shoved the carving and pouch into the bag, grabbed her mirror, and ran. The footsteps followed, gaining on her, shattering leaves at every step. She ducked into the house and crawled all the way to her bedroom so as not to leave bloodstains on the floor. A ponderous tread circled the house.

She wanted to rouse her sleeping husband and make him chase away her terror. Instead she slipped the bag down behind the stacked chests and crawled into bed. She was still panting and shivering long after the footsteps departed.

________


	3. Chapter 3

She tried to immerse herself once more in the ocean of kindness that was her husband’s house. But the endless play now seemed irksome, and she could not help but dwell on all that her husband’s family must be hiding from her. At night she lay in bed smelling the bag in its hiding place: mold, dirt, leather, cedar bark. Its rich odors were so different from the fleeting perfumes of her husband’s country.  
Maruki did not seem able to smell them. For a long time, she did not open the bag, afraid of what might wait inside it. But her doubts began to change her into a rude stranger. One day, as her attendants were fitting the dresses they had made to accommodate her increasing plumpness, Aimi asked Kasumi, “Where does the king go every morning, when he puts on his shoes and headdress?”  
Her sister-in-law’s smile faded for only an instant. “The king’s business takes him from home, sister. Look at this border I embroidered for you; do you like it?” And Kasumi held up a new red dress decorated with bands of yellow leaves.  
Aimi the princess would have understood that the truth about the king’s absences mattered less than the love Kasumi offered in its place. But the stranger who had taken up residence in Aimi smelled evasion. “The queen goes that way, too,” said the stranger, using Aimi’s mouth.  
“Perhaps you saw her returning from a visit to her relatives,” Kasumi said, smoothing the dress against Aimi. “I think this will fit you for a while, sister.”  
The stranger, who had keener senses than Aimi, heard the worry in those words; her sister-in-law was afraid that she had seen the giant blood-smeared bird, the secret shape of the queen! A long-forgotten emotion reared up in Aimi, as frightening as it was compelling. “Why don’t you want me to go in that direction?” demanded the stranger.  
“We only…” Kasumi made a visible effort to produce another loving smile. “Aimi, don’t torment yourself with such questions! What matters is that you’re here, and you’re happy, and that makes our prince happy!”  
Evasion and secrets: the foreign emotions swelled, crested, and roared through her. Aimi remembered its name: anger. “Why won’t you tell me the truth?!” she screamed, and she ripped the dress from Kasumi’s hands and threw it to the ground.  
Her attendants stared at her, slack-jawed. Then the anger drained away, leaving Aimi as surprised and appalled as they were. She began to weep. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why—”  
They hugged her and stroked her hair. “Hush, little sister,” Sumire said. “It’s all right.”  
But it was not all right. She was humiliated by her outburst. She longed to remain Aimi, the adored, the comforted, the sweet-tempered and loving. Why couldn’t she be happy being happy?” No one could love this awful stranger.  
And yet the doubts kept returning.  
One morning, as she played on the beach with the other girls, she found herself gazing again at the forest. She was so tired of brightness, she realized. She was tired of the shining sea, the shadow-less sky, the glittering sand, the eternally glowing house. The only darkness that came to this house was at night, outside, and they did not let her out once sunlight had disappeared from the sea.  
She longed for shadow and the smells of damp secret places: moss, wet leaves, rotten bark. She longed to walk.  
Aimi begged out of the next round of their guessing game. And while the other girls laughed and shouted questions, she set off down that path strewn with knife-sharp leaves. Even in the forest, there was no real shadow, only degrees of glare shing through the translucent leaves.  
Footsteps were already pounding along the path behind her. Voices called, “Princess! Sister! Lady!”  
“You mustn’t go this way,” Kasumi panted as she ran up. She clutched Aimi’s shoulder.  
Sumire caught Aimi’s wrist. “You’ve cut your feet again!”  
A girl named Haru gripped her other hand. “Come back with us. The cuts must hurt so. Let us tend them!” Their feet were also bleeding.  
“My feet don’t hurt,” Aimi lied. She tried to take another step, only to discover that the three young women held her so firmly she could not move at all. Anger spilled through her like blood from a wound.  
“Let me go!” she screamed.  
They did. She backed away from them. They watched her without moving.  
The path led out of the trees to the other beach. Her feet left blood in the sand.  
A blue sea lapped at that beach. But as she approached it, the white sand wavered and the water thinned, and suddenly she teetered at the brink of a windy abyss. A black shape swooped toward her, wings thundering, up through turbulent, uprising mountains of gray and white. Aimi scrambled backward as the gigantic black bird alit on the precipitous beach and folded its wings. The bird’s talons were red with blood.  
Terror welled up in Aimi as cold as her anger had been hot. She backed slowly toward the forest. The bird fixed one eye on her and stepped after her.  
“You! Little mortal!” it screeched.  
The black-robed queen, still tall as a tree, stood where the bird had been. She looked fierce enough to kill Aimi.  
Aimi stumbled back. The queen kept stepping after her, huge and inexorable. “Do you have any gratitude for their generosity? Do you think you can dispense with their protection?” She bent to thrust her face at Aimi’s. “Do you think you’re strong enough for this place?”  
Aimi’s teeth chattered, but she said, “I just wanted—I just wanted to walk—”  
“If you are going to go your own way, little mortal,” Takemi hissed, “you had better be strong. You had better stick fast to your nature. Are you able? I doubt it. Do what you like, but then don’t ask for help.”  
And then, shrinking to human size, the queen stalked up the path in a cloud of black, rain-wet feathers. Her daughters scurried out of her way.  
In the direction the queen had come from, the beach had steadied; the cold void was a placid blue sea once more.  
“Why are you staring at me?” Aimi screamed at her attendants, and she, too, pushed past them. She ran back to the house to hide in her bedroom.

____

“What’s wrong, darling?” Maruki asked.  
Aimi knew the queen was right: she wasn’t strong. And she knew how they all took care of her. But she needed to know what they were hiding.  
“Where does the path through the forest lead?” she said. “Why doesn’t anybody want me to go there? Where does your father go every day? What did your mother mean when she called me a mortal? Where did I come from?”  
“That’s a lot of questions,” he said gently.  
She took that as another evasion. Anger blazed up again.  
“I just want you to be happy here, and safe,” Maruki said. “Everything I do is for that and no other reason.”  
He began to kiss her, and after a while he succeeded in turning her to thoughts to love. But now there was an icy lump in her belly that would not melt. When he had fallen asleep, she puzzled over what the queen meant by being true to her nature. What was a mortal? What was a mortal’s nature?  
Aimi knew what she was. Selfish. Restless. Unhappy. Unwise.  
As quietly as she could, Aimi crawled out of bed and retrieved the leather satchel. The pouch and carving lay inside it where she had hurriedly thrust them before. She opened the pouch and pulled out the first object her hand touched, a bottle of stone or rock crystal. Had this, too, come from her mother and father?  
When she extracted the stopper, out welled light and a rich, sweet smell she had no name for, only a picture: a vast sea of rainbow-shot water.  
But close on its heels, another vision wrenched at her. Her husband held the bottle, or one like it, and rainbowed healing drops spilled from it onto her chest. His face was as she knew it—kind, adoring—but over his head hung racks of split-open corpses whose skull-tops had been emptied. Mouthfuls of teeth grinned at her. Eye sockets stared accusingly, imploringly.  
Aimi pressed the stopper back into the bottle as far as it would go. But awful images kept spilling out—  
A giant bird stalked her through those racks of corpses—  
A dirty woman crouched in the smoke beneath them. She offered Aimi a crude bowl full of—  
\--brains, from the dead men—  
That woman looked just like the queen, if the queen quit bathing and dressing her hair, and took off her bright clothes and jewelry.  
\--Her beloved husband had been there.  
Now a hundred sparks of doubt caught fire. Her husband’s family didn’t want her to know anything, wouldn’t let her out of their sight. What mattered, Kasumi had told her, is that their prince stayed happy. Was she just a captive whom he had rescued for his pleasure?  
Weeping, she tried to shove the bottle back into the pouch. But it would not go in at first, and when she tried to push aside the obstruction, her careless movement dislodged something sharp—a harpoon point—with a bundle of string attached. As the string emerged, rope big as her wrist spilled onto her lap. Huge coils of it knocked her down, and fathom after fathom coiled around her and writhed through the bedroom. A coil fell on the sleeping Maruki.  
Aimi frantically tried to push the rope back into the pouch, but even a single handspan of it was too big. Maruki stirred and murmured her name. Then it occurred to her to slide the harpoon point into the pouch. In an eyeblink, the rope had turned back into a bit of thin string.  
Maruki said, “What are you doing, love?”  
She hastily stuffed pouch, bottle, and bag under a new dress that no one had yet folded into a chest.  
He sat up. “You haven’t opened any of the boxes, have you?”  
“No,” she said.  
“You’ve been crying.” Maruki came over to her and wrapped his arms around her, wiped tears from her cheek. “More of your nightmares, love? Let me make you happy again.”  
How dare he pretend love or kindness? She snarled, “You haven’t been trying to keep me safe. You’ve been deceiving me!”  
He blinked. “I only did what you wanted.”  
“I didn’t want to forget my mother and father!”  
He said nothing. Her rage mounted until she felt she had claws inside her hands, as if powerful jaws lurked in her skull. “What was that house with all the dead people? Why were you there?”  
“It was my aunt’s house,” he said. “My mother sent me. She worries that her sister is ill.”  
“Did your aunt kill my parents?”  
“No,” he said. “No, she did not. But, Aimi, my mother’s people are very fierce. How could I protect everything they hunt? I did my best for you.”  
So sincere. But he had always seemed sincere, and look what he had done: stolen all she had known and loved before him.  
He kissed her. He whispered endearments and pleaded with her. But for the first time she could not respond at all. She could only sit stonily, wishing for darkness.  
“Don’t throw my love back at me, Aimi,” he begged.  
She did not reply. Eventually, he lay down again. When she was sure he had fallen back asleep, she pulled out the chest he opened when he went out in his father’s place. She would not have thought to do so if he hadn’t mentioned it.  
The shoes he wore at those times lay atop a robe of spotless white feathers. She tried on the shoes. They were far too large. She considered the robe; the nights outside the house were very cold. But she decided she would rather have her own robe—the one they had discarded on the garbage heap.  
She replaced everything and returned the chest to the stack. Then, taking the pouch, bag, and mirror, she crept through the house, too angry to care about the dangers outside.


	4. Chapter 4

At the garbage heap, she shook the leaves from the fur robe and outer cloak and settled them around her shoulders. Then she rolled up the rest of the clothing, tied it atop the bag, and slung the bag on her back.  
Weighed down with her own things, she felt not just warmer but also more solid. They gave her hope she could find her way home.  
She continued down the path, slicing her feet no matter how carefully she stepped. At the other beach, she put away the mirror, lest its glow betray her to the things that hunted at night.  
Her husband and his family did not want her to come this direction, but except for the cold wind and scattered leaves, it seemed just like the beach in front of the house: a strip of sand between forest and star-filled sea. There was a strange red light on the horizon that she hadn’t noticed before.  
The king had gone this way. How dangerous could it be?  
Aimi crept forward. Vertigo rolled over her in waves, and the hole at the bottom of the beach flickered in and out of visibility. Tonight, the void it opened into was charcoal gray.  
On its far side, her dizziness lessened and she set off. She walked until her muscles ached, her feet burned from leaf cuts, and a long-forgotten pain stabbed at her belly: hunger.  
The first time she heard wingbeats, she pulled her gut-skin cloak over her head and scrambled under the trees until the noise passed by. The cloak protected her face and arms, but the leaves slashed viciously at her feet.  
Another of the great birds winged overhead, and then a flock of smaller birds crying harshly. The moon swam up into the sea. It was long past full, a deflated kelp-bulb of light. The wind grew colder. In the forest, leaves chinked like ice.  
The glow spread across the horizon until the ocean glittered red. At last the shore bent away, leaving only a windswept promontory that pointed straight ahead. Aimi stopped. She had come this way not at all certain that it would lead her home, but guessing, or hoping, that all the secrets of her husband’s house were connected.  
As she hesitated, a fallen leaf snapped behind her. A figure strode toward her with a gleam as if from a large eye. She scrambled behind a dune to hide, only to discover, vertigo rushing over her, that below her gaped another of the holes in the world. This one was full of moonlight.  
Footsteps rasped above her head. It was the king who walked by; the gleaming abalone disk of his headdress was the eye she had seen. He waded into the ocean where a dark trace of sand led across the stars, skirting the hole. The water did not reach higher than his knees.  
Fighting the overwhelming dizziness, Aimi waded after him. The king, who moved so much more swiftly, had already rounded the hole and was descending over a near horizon: feet, legs, waist, shoulders dropping out of sight. The submerged sandbar deposited Aimi at a sliver of dry beach. No more black sky here, only the brilliant red glow—  
\--The source lay below her, below the horizon—  
\--It was churning fire at the bottom of an abyssal cliff.  
That could not be where she had come from.  
The fire spread left and right as far as she could see. Its brightness seared her eyes. There was no ladder or stair. No one could descend the precipice—but there was the king, climbing down with impossible speed.  
The king shrank until she could no longer see him. Did a shape swim toward him through the sea of fire?  
She drew back trembling from the brink. Then a bone-jarring screech ripped the night, and black wings thundered out of the hole in the sea behind her. A cold, wet gust flung her cloak across the sand. Trying to brace against the sudden pull, Aimi lost her balance and fell.  
She managed to keep her arms atop the crumbling bridge of sand, but her body slip off and her heavy bag tugged her down. Red sky and starry sea, moonlit void and fire-lit cliffs swung end over end as if surf tumbled her.  
The terror of falling gave her the strength the drag herself back onto the sandbar. Then the sun popped into view. She squeezed her eyes shut. The immense bird thundered away, screaming its displeasure.  
The image of the sun kept exploding behind her eyelids: a blazing disk, and inside it a face and fishlike body. Heat and light fell on her like a landslide. She pressed her face on her arms, expecting her hair to burst into flame. After a moment, though, the brutal heat lessened. She slitted her eyes open.  
The king had just passed her by. On his forehead where the abalone disk had been, he bore the sun, and the cheerful, affectionate king, who always had a kind word for her, walked stooped and burdened, his face distorted with terrible effort.  
The king had not noticed her presence. Perhaps the sun blinded him too.  
Now Aimi saw that she lay on, not beach or sea bottom, but a transparent solidity the color of seawater. A void of sunlit mist hung above her. She had slipped through the hole, but instead of falling into the void, she had stuck like a limpet on the world’s underside. The king walked upside-down on that blue surface, daylight racing ahead of him. Carrying the sun from one end of the world to the other.  
Vertigo claimed her again. Billows of shadow and orange light spun through the void.  
The queen was right. This was no place for a mortal.  
Clouds drifted beneath the world. Black specks circled in them. Carefully, afraid she might come loose and plummet into those depths, Aimi rose and hurried after the king.  
She chased him all day across the barren blue expanse on her bloody and increasingly sore feet. Despite his burden, the king drew rapidly ahead. Meanwhile all sense of dimension and distance faded. She could not look straight at the king because the sun was too bright; if she looked anywhere else—at the featureless blue, at the cloud masses sailing through the void—dizziness overwhelmed her.  
Then a break opened in the clouds. Through a deep canyon she saw another country: snow-capped mountains, winding inlets, cloud-shadow chasing sunlight over the water.  
She stopped. It was heartbreakingly beautiful. Homesickness pierced her to the bone, even though nothing looked familiar except for the fact of that world, green forest, gray sea. The memory of smells swept over her: wild onion in the summer heat, mint crushed between her fingers, rain on new cedar boards—bits of memory lodged deep in her heart, no piece connected to any other one, but all an inextricable part of who she had been.  
The scent of coffee and curry. Warm arms holding her close, hands stroking her hair. Ann’s soft voice. Home.  
Here was the reason they had tried to keep her from the path into the forest. Once she looked down through the clouds and saw that world, she would never be happy again.  
She was lost among the cloud tops. How did she get down—  
\--from the sky?  
A new wave of dizziness crashed over her, and she squeezed her eyes shut.  
When she opened them, the gap in the clouds had closed. Her longing for the land below was so intense she wanted to leap into them. After a while she remembered the harpoon point. The mere thought of trying to climb down those uncountable fathoms of rope made her sick with terror. What if it wasn’t long enough?  
But how else would she get home? She was a captive here.  
At last she fished the harpoon point out of the pouch. She was careful to leave the bundle of string inside until she had stabbed the point deep into the slick blue surface of the sky.  
It never lets go. Who told her that?  
A line of dark clouds sailed toward her, so tall that the tops flattened against the sky. She threw the string upward into their depths. It unfolded, swelled into rope thick as her wrist, fell, fell, fell—she turned her gaze away and fixed it on the point. The rope, she now saw, had been braided from several smaller strands. She worked her fingers among the strands, gripped tightly, reached over her head for another handhold—  
Thunder boomed, echoed and reechoed, became wing beats. Up through the gloom flew one of the huge black birds, lightning crackling from its head, gale-blasts roaring from its wings. The smooth expanse of the sky offered no place to hide. All she could do was cower, clinging to the rope as the bird swooped straight at her, claws outstretched like an eagle snatching a fish.  
The impact struck her like a boulder. The claws slid off the gut-skin cloak, but the force of the blow rolled her across the underside of the sky, ripping her hands from the rope. Thunder rumbled continuously as the great bird flapped after her. She struggled onto hands and knees to face it—  
The bird pulled up, screeching in anger, then winged away into the clouds. Thunderclaps rolled into silence.   
Panting, she climbed to her feet. But a figure blocked her way. It was Maruki. He held the harpoon point, and the rope trailed over his head into the clouds.  
“Aimi,” he said, cold and harsh. “I can’t keep you safe if you run away.”  
He wore the cloak of white feathers, now pushed back from his shoulders. With a chill she realized that he, son of Takemi, also possessed a bird robe.  
She had angered the prince of heaven. Thrown his love back at him. What would her punishment be?  
Then he said, “Come back with me, darling.”  
Looking into those blue eyes, color of the sea of heaven, she could not help but long to see them warm toward her again. But her own anger pushed back the tide of longing.  
“How can I? You deceived me in so many ways. You took away my memories!”  
“You can have them back,” he said, “if you want them.”  
“Another gift?” she said bitterly.  
“I only tried to make you happy. I tried so hard.”  
Happy. Her ache for Sojiro and Ann, for the world below, told her that real love didn’t leave a bewildered blankness at the center of your being. It was as compelling as the smells of earth and brine, it struck deep into your bones.  
Real love was sharp as a knife.  
Stick fast to your nature, the queen had said.  
Whatever her nature was.  
She wanted to scream at him, but there was still enough of the princess in her to keep her voice steady, her words measured. “Do you really want to make me happy?”  
“Oh yes,” he said. “What can I give you, Aimi? What will make you happy?”  
“I want to go home,” she said, and then, on the verge of tears, “I’m sorry. But I want to go back where I belong.”  
It seemed like a very long time before he replied. “Of course. If that’s what you want.”


	5. Chapter 5

Maruki led her back to the king’s house, where he announced to his family that she wanted to go home. The softening of the queen’s expression into approval was so slight that Aimi at first thought she had imagined it.  
In the morning, though, as she said her final goodbyes, the queen surprised her with a pair of the plain short shoes her own size. “They may not be pretty,” Takemi said, “but they will never wear out.” Aimi stammered her thanks, even while she privately wondered what kind of hide they had been sewn from.  
She and Maruki accompanied the king on his eastward journey as far as the hole in the sky. There the two of them stopped. Maruki rammed the harpoon point, which he had kept, into one of the trees. With his hand closed over the bundle of string, he played out enough rope to knot a harness around her.  
“I’ll let you down,” he said. “I know where you want to go.” And then, when she hesitated, “I’ll make sure you land safely. Otherwise, you could come down in the middle of the ocean, or worse places.”


End file.
